Under the Radar

Blog Roll

State Department hit with suit for Kissinger records

By JOSH GERSTEIN

03/04/2015 05:12 PM EST

As the State Department faces a fusillade of questions about the email practices of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the agency was hit with a lawsuit Wednesday accusing it of dragging its feet for more than a decade over the release of details of telephone conversations former secretary of state Henry Kissinger conducted in the 1970s.

The National Security Archive, an organization which gathers declassified government records, filed suit to demand that the department complete a long-delayed review of the near-verbatim transcripts Kissinger secretaries made as they listened in on his telephone calls.

"Notwithstanding the fact that plaintiff submitted its initial FOIA request for the Kissinger telcons more than thirteen years ago, to date, defendant State has not fully responded to plaintiff’s FOIA requests and appeals, in which well over 600 Kissinger telephone conversation transcripts are at issue," the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, said.

National Security Archive executive director Tom Blanton said the suit and the current flap over Clinton's use of private e-mail are part of a pattern of difficulties accessing records of former secretaries of state.

"There's a long track record of secretaries of state having real problems keeping records available for posterity," Blanton said in an interview.

Like Clinton, Kissinger claimed the records as his own. He deposited them at the Library of Congress, where they were not accessible to the public.

Kissinger surrendered the so-called "telcons" to the State Department in 2001 after Blanton's group threatened a lawsuit. About 15,000 were released in the years that followed but about 700 were withheld from release.

Those in dispute now involve conversations between Kissinger and President Gerald Ford. The State Department has claimed the records are exempt from disclosure under the deliberative process provisions of the Freedom of Information Act and on grounds of executive privilege.

A State Department spokesman said the agency does not comment on ongoing litigation.

The department said this week that Clinton sent copies of 55,000 pages of emails from her time as secretary of state to the agency in December. The records had been kept on a private e-mail account when she was in office.